Chiang Kai Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

Fenby chose the Xi'an incident of December 1936 as the prologue for the book, exposing his readers right away to the drama of Chiang's detention, a key turning point in the Generalissimo's struggle for China. If Zhang Xueliang, who arrested Chiang, instead supported his commander in the final assault on the Communist positions, perhaps China would be reunified there and then. These ifs - Chiang's long list of lost opportunities - are brought vividly to light in this excellent biography, highlighting Chiang's numerous failures, as well as his remarkable ability to bounce back from the brink of defeat.Chiang's main problem, in Fenby's account, was his method of leadership. Chiang was a master of political intrigue, of playing one rival faction against another, of forging and breaking alliances. But often Chiang's scheming, even if it achieved his immediate narrow ends, undermined his long-term objectives, fatally weakening the Generalissimo at crucial turning points in the struggle against the Japanese and the Communists. A micromanager, Chiang lacked a broader vision of what he wanted to accomplish: ultimately, even though he won many battles, he lost the war.Fenby pulls no punches in his account of Chiang's relationship with his main ally and sponsor, the United States. The stars of the powerplay - the Generalissimo and "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell - were both at fault for allowing their personal vendettas interfere with the broader war effort. Each side pulled strings in Washington, leaving Roosevelt at a loss as to what to do about China, which was anyhow way down his list of priorities. But Stillwell, in particular, is criticized for his vanity, presumptuousness and stubbornness, and for putting his glorious campaign in Burma above the needs of the China theatre, especially at the time of the crucial Ichigo offensive. Had not Chiang and Swillwell worked at cross-purposes, perhaps China would have done better in the protracted war against Japan, leaving the GMD in a better position to cope with the Communist challenge.Who lost China? Fenby is ambiguous on this point. He does seem to blame George Marshall at one point for his naïve efforts to bring the Guomindang and the Communists to the negotiating table, which allowed the CCP forces to regroup and may have ultimately cost Chiang his victory in the Civil War. At the same time, Fenby's account of the GMD's difficulties - rampant inflation, corruption, loss of support in the countryside - suggests that Washington could do very little to save the regime from collapse.Equally ambiguous is Fenby's treatment of the Chiang-Mao talks in the early postwar. In places he seems to argue that if Chiang showed more willingness to compromise and if he had adopted democratic reforms, some modus vivendi could have been reached with the Communists. But elsewhere, Fenby relapses into a more fatalistic view that Chiang and Mao would fight to the death, and that there really was not ground for a compromise solution.Fenby opens a revealing window into the Generalissimo's personal life, his relationship with his mother, his son, and, most intriguingly, with his wives, especially Soong Meiling, the "empress" of China. Fenby draws a fascinating portrait of Madame Chiang - attractive, intelligent but also vain and vicious, a pillar of support for her aloof husband but also a tireless plotter who at one point even had an affair with Wendell Willkie and conspired to rule the world hand-in-hand with the Republican hopeful. Chiang, despite his occasional womanizing, comes across as a family man (certainly, compared to Mao), a fatherly Confucian figure who treated his wives and children as he treated his nation: sternly but with some benevolence.Was the cup half-empty or half-full? While stressing the Guomindang's multiple failures, Fenby gives credit to Chiang for implementing crucial, if aborted, reforms during the Nanjing decade, for uniting China, for raising her international profile to the exalted (even if superficial) status as one of the Great Four, for persisting in the war against Japan in the face of dire odds. Even if Chiang lost China, China was not lost. In part through his efforts it returned to the world stage as a nation, rather than a motley assembly of warring fiefdoms.In his conclusion, Fenby addresses deeper questions of the meaning of China's encounter with modernity. Today's China in some ways has come to resemble China of the Nanjing decade, and the CCP, mired in corruption and in-fighting, looks more and more like the Guomindang of old. Yet China has also made a leap to modernity of the kind that would have tallied well with Chiang's hopes for his nation. In a strange way, then, the CCP continues Chiang's revolution. In the meantime, Chiang's republic in Taiwan made a leap of another kind - to democracy and rule of law, which are still absent in the mainland. This, then, is the irony of Chiang's life and times: China's present-day is more his than Mao's and, who knows, perhaps China's future is also his. One day, if and when China is democratized and reunified, Chiang's embalmed remains will return to the country that he had lost but also won.

When journalists write history books the result is often something of a muddle: there tend to snippets of detail (added to provide "colour") and there tends not to be much in the way of an overarching interpretative discussion of the facts or anything in the way of a theoretical framework. Many such books regurgitate high-school history between new, glossy covers featuring irrelevant sub-titles ("China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost") - their contents add little or nothing to scholarship on their subject matter and in place of this make unsupported assertions and random observations ... the reader is soon left with the uncomfortable feeling of having had too much but in no way having been satiated, just as one might feel after sitting down to a three course banquet consisting of potato crisps served with lashings of Coca-Cola.Mr Fenby's book is a representative example of this genre. It is a boring, unimaginatively-written jumble filled with dull and irrelevant detail ("...a Nationalist mission to Hong Kong, headed by a one-legged admiral...", "the Prime Minister sent [...] a valiant, one-eyed, one-handed First World War veteran ...", there are pages and pages of waffle bolstered by this kind of claptrap), replete with bold and entirely unsupported statements ("Stillwell wanted to build a modern, professional army; Chiang saw military units as chess pieces to be manipulated for his benefit") and burdened with passages which provide clear insights into Mr Fenby's evident ignorance about China, including the bizarre assertion that Chiang Kai-Shek insisted on speaking the Wu language of his native region instead of Mandarin (which is impossible, as no-one from the rest of China would have understood him). It goes on and on in a random, tedious way, telling us little we didn't already know if we did Modern History at high school.Mr Fenby allows himself the luxury of a bob each way in his summation of Chiang's career, and retains his addled style to the bitter end. In the last few pages the disorganisation of the writing is painfully evident. Instead of a balanced conclusion, the reader is left to wade through paragraphs which contradict one another in a welter of innuendo and cliché. The penultimate paragraph of the epilogue features the journalist's ace-in-the-hole: a quote from a person-in-the-street, in this case a tour guide - and this, alas, is an appropriate epitaph for the level of scholarship Mr Fenby brought to bear in writing his book.Read Jay Taylor's "The Generalissimo" instead.

I have been reading up on World War 2 in China and this book comes with my best recommendations. Fenby gives a very good background to events leading up to the War with Japan and clarifies a number of important parts of Chinese history and is unafraid to tackle legends in a clear way.In fact I found that he explains a number of things that before didn't make much sense to me.Even though the subject is Chiang Kai Shek it is also every bit the history of China and Chiang Kai Shek is clearly one of the big three men to influence the history of China, the other two are Mao and Sun Yat-sen. I should add I found that this book does a good job of telling Sun Yat-sen's story as well and explains the events leading up to Mao's and the communist victory in 1949.I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the subject of the histroy of China and found it very useful. In fact I found it more useful in this regard than Rana Mitters book  China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival  as it explains underlying causes much more clearly.For the military side I should point out Harmsens book  Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze  which so far is one of the best books on the fighting of the period. China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for SurvivalShanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze

This copy is a disgrace, it is illiterate. Jonathan Fenby is an excellent writer who has written a definitive account but he is totally let down by this terrible edition. How it got put on the market is a mystery, Amazon should redress the crime immediately and give me my money back. I recommend you to go out and buy a paper version of his book so that it can be read and appreciated. A massive work of scholarship very badly let down by Amazon.

Having working in Taiwan for the last 25 years I found this book uncovered a lot of things people dont like to talk about, or choose to ignore, but always knew about. Having read the book and took time to re read certain sections I think it makes one realise how different the world would be today if things had swung the other way for him. I dont want to say too much as it will spoil the read.

The amount of high quality research and insight in this book is, at the risk of hyperbole, quite spectacular. Although the author's writing style and I didn't always jive, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned a lot about Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat-sen, and Republican China by reading it.My main complaint, and the reason I am only allotting 4 stars, is that the book essentially ends in 1949 as Chiang and the Kuomintang evacuate the mainland. I am interested in reading some expert analysis as to why, despite both starting as poor totalitarian states that paid lip-service to democracy, the ROC on Taiwan slowly morphed into an actual democracy while the PRC on the mainland remains a democracy in name only. There are some more recent works (Taylor, 2011) that appear to touch on the Taiwan period as well that may offer more insight in that regard.Highly recommended nonetheless!

A well preserved copy of an important book